Reading any book is a personal experience, often mysterious and magical, that includes an unmistakable connection between writer and reader.

But readers of Tracy’s new release, a novella Cooper’s Hawk: The Remembering, claim they’re experiencing something much more. We’ve provided a few examples below, but you can read more “aha” moments here!

“Willis is a force! I spend my days now asking the questions, What does this mean?and What am I missing?”

“I’m so in love with Willis and Phoebe’s relationship! I’ll never forget, Accept your gifts.”

“I got to the end and thought, What?!What?!No! I had to read the last several pages several times and then I just lost it. Burst into tears. What an emotional release. Now I’m going back to read the whole thing over again!”

“THE most exquisite voice I’ve ever read. It’s as if the words were being recited back to me from the page.”

“The day after I finished the book, a coyote ran alongside my car on the INTERSTATE. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I heard Willis in my head, saying, “What does this mean?” I took note of the direction the coyote ran off toward—south—and pulled over to Google. The message was spot-on. The coyote is a trickster, and I have a woman in my life who has just scammed a whole bunch of us. I wanted to believe she was telling the truth. And south—my childhood. Yep. Brought me back to the first painful time I was tricked by a so-called friend. Willis is right! The answers are right there in front of us all the time if we’ll just WAKE UP!”

Tracy’s sixth book in seven years, Cooper’s Hawk: The Remembering, releases Jan. 20 from PipeVine Press, the new traditional imprint of 30-year-old custom publisher, Warren Publishing, located in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Cooper’s Hawk will be the first title published by PipeVine Press. “It’s quite an honor to hear you have the book someone’s been waiting to publish,” Tracy said of her conversation with PipeVine Press owner and founder, Mindy Kuhn. “My agent kept receiving impressive comments from the big house editors, but no one was willing to take what they saw as a risk, given the subject matter within Cooper’s Hawk. Ironically, a noteworthy, but smaller, house claimed it wasn’t large enough to provide what Cooper’s Hawk ‘deserved’ in the way of marketing attention.”

But enter PipeVine Press, which according to Tracy has “moved heaven and earth to ensure a release in just two months” since agreeing to terms in November. “Most writers wait 18 to 24 months to release a book after signing with a publisher,” she said. “PipeVine has thrown everything it has on this book and everyone on its team to ensure a record-breaking, successful release. I’m honored and grateful.”

It’s also rare, Tracy added, to be given so much access to the publishing team. “I drove to Charlotte (a few hours from her home in Liberty, North Carolina) to meet with Mindy and her senior editor, Amy Ashby. We had a lengthy discussion regarding everything from the themes within the book to what we agreed was the right size, feel, and format for the book.”

At one point during their conversation, Mindy even asked Tracy if she’d prefer a hard copy format. “I told her no, that I’d always had a sense of Cooper’s Hawk being paperback…with lots of dogeared pages from having been read over and over again for newfound nuggets or from having been lovingly loaned from one reader to another.”

Tracy also told the PipeVine team that the cover image, to her anyway, was as important as the story itself. “When Mindy’s email of the cover image landed in my inbox, I was actually afraid to open the file for a few minutes.”

When she did finally open the file, Tracy said she burst in tears and started happy dancing with her husband. Then she ran the book cover image up the road to her neighbor’s house because her neighbor and dear friend, Novella Kennedy, was the one who had inspired and encouraged Tracy to write a book about a combat veteran named Willis. “As far as Novella and I are concerned, Mindy and her team fully delivered on their promise to create a cover that most resonates with the themes and tone of Cooper’s Hawk. We couldn’t be happier.”

Book clubs are likely to find the reading guide and Q/A interview with Tracy at the end of the book especially helpful for their readers.

At the Cooper VA Hospital, tensions surface after the arrival of a rage-filled war hero and his troubled son and the mental breakdown of everyone’s favorite nurse. Drawing on his upbringing with a shaman grandfather, Willis, the new-hire janitor and Vietnam veteran with one arm, relies on lessons from the natural world—and a special hawk—to steer the boy and Phoebe, in fact everyone at the Cooper VA, toward the most benevolent outcome.

PipeVine has also agreed to publish Tracy’s next three books — the prequel and sequel to Cooper’s Hawk, and a spirituality-based memoir.

And LOOK — Cooper’s Hawk is already drawing significant praise:

“Extremely engaging…Such heart and energy and voice—all of which unfolds
with confidence and purity…It’s been a long time since a book has moved me
this much.”
— Jeffery Hess, author of Beachhead and Cold War Canoe Club

“Cooper’s Hawk introduces us to veteran-patients who rely on their VA
hospital for their health, their sanity, and their community…and reveals the
beauty in their struggles and the magic in their tragedy. Bottom line, you
cannot get through this book without feeling something deeply.”
— M.L. Doyle, co-author of the Shoshana Johnson memoir,
I’m Still Standing: From Captive U.S. Soldier to Free Citizen—My Journey Home,
and author of The Bonding Spell and The Peacekeeper’s Photograph

“‘What do you imagine happens to a man when he finally faces the truth
about the Divinity within his enemy?’ In Cooper’s Hawk, Tracy Crow explores the divinity within all of us, the places where we shirk from seeing it, or where we long to. A work of great compassion, open-hearted and unflinching, Cooper’s Hawk provides the fodder for ample discussion about what it means to survive, to heal, and to forgive.”
— Andria Williams, author of The Longest Night

“With this novella, Tracy Crow has created a world that transports readers
into VA hospital rooms and into the cemetery beyond, with all the psychological
freight that this implies. Even more, Crow’s fiction returns us to the world we
live in—and to ourselves within it….”
— Brian Turner, author of My Life As A Foreign Country: A Memoir and Here, Bullet

“If you’ve ever wondered about the invisible wounds of war, you’ll want to
read this book. With the warmth of a storyteller and clarity of perspective
only a cultural insider can offer, Tracy Crow takes us into a world few will
ever know—though the connections matter to us all.”
— Kate Hendricks Thomas, PhD,
author of Brave, Strong, True: The Modern Warrior’s Battle for Balance and Bulletproofing the Psyche

“A deeply spiritual meditation on compassion, creativity, the natural world,
and human connection. In Cooper’s Hawk, Tracy Crow goes beyond tales
of individual suffering in the aftermath of war to consider the nature of
moral injury, the possibility of redemption, and the ways in which we make
meaning from traumatic experience.”
— Jerri Bell, managing editor of O-Dark-Thirty and co-author of It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan

Tracy and co-author Jerri Bell were featured authors at the Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading Nov. 11 at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg.

L-R front: Tracy, Jerri, Brooke L-R back: Carol and Anne

As part of their presentation and discussion, they invited Tampa Bay contributors Carol Barkalow, Anne Visser-Ney, and Brooke King to read excerpts from their essays published within It’s My Country Too.

From Library Journal, a starred review: “This rich anthology of women’s military stories is ripe with the history of female contributions to U.S. conflicts. Edited by Bell (managing editor, O-Dark-Thirty) and Crow (Eyes Right), with an introduction by Kayla Williams (Love My Rifle More Than You), this collection provides firsthand military accounts from scores of women spanning from the Revolutionary War to the Afghanistan War. While some of the women, such as abolitionist Harriet Tubman, are already well known, these accounts also draw upon the service of those who may otherwise have been lost to history. Particularly for earlier conflicts, this compendium relies upon government records to piece together women’s efforts, but it truly shines when women’s own words are used to tell the tales of combat and military experience. VERDICT This engaging, meticulously researched work belongs on the shelves of libraries across America. Enthusiastically recommended for all collections.—Mattie Cook, Lake Odessa Comm. Lib., MI”

Tracy has accepted the positions of president and CEO of MilSpeak Foundation, Inc., a 501c3 public charitable organization that supports the creative arts endeavors of military servicemembers, veterans, families, and caregivers through instructional on-site and online seminars and workshops, and various publishing platforms. MilSpeak Foundation is the brainchild of Sally Parmer, a retired Marine, who passed the leadership torch to Tracy after a series of family health complications.

“Sally’s vision is my vision,” Tracy said. “I’ve used this summer to go through files and contracts with our writers, and I’ve turned often to Sally for advice and reflection about our future. She’s an incredibly generous mentor.”

Tracy explained that MilSpeak Foundation is moving in the direction of building upon its current model of on-site writing workshops for the military community and digital publishing by adding components such as online workshops, editorial fee-based services with academically qualified veteran-authors to assist with manuscript preparation, a print-on-demand option for future select titles, and an employment rehab vocational component to provide job opportunities to veterans and military family members who are qualified to assist with teaching and editorial services.

“MilSpeak Foundation has now absorbed my On Point Seminars & Workshops as a training division,” Tracy said, adding that this new division also includes her specialized On Point Women Warrior Writing Workshops, a collaboration with Paula Broadwell’s Think Broader Foundation.

This summer, MilSpeak Foundation debuted its new website that currently links to its original site established by Parmer in 2009. “Since MilSpeak gets thousands of visitors a day, looking over writing content by veterans and families, we want to make this transition as smooth as possible,” Tracy said. “Moving MilSpeak’s mountain of content over to its new site will take some time, so for now, we’re asking everyone for a little patience.”

Tracy recently agreed to an offer of representation from literary agency, Nine Speakers, Inc., founded in 1988 by President Diane Nine.

Nine has built an impressive reputation in the literary world that spans decades of representation for works by celebrities, politicians, and notable journalists. She and her Nine Speakers, Inc., team are eager to represent Tracy’s newest manuscript, “Cooper’s Hawk: The Remembering,” as well as Tracy’s plans for a prequel, sequel, and memoir.

“What impressed me most about Diane was her depth and breadth of knowledge about publishing,” Tracy says of their ninety-minute initial conversation. “Well…I suppose what really impressed me most was her love for ‘Cooper’s Hawk.’ It’s not every day that characters as memorable as these and a story as enduring as theirs gift my waking consciousness. Hearing Diane and her team voice the same reaction to ‘Cooper’s Hawk’ made the decision to place this book in their hands an easy one.”

If Nine and her team successfully place “Cooper’s Hawk” with a publisher, this will be Tracy’s sixth book since 2011 — four with the University of Nebraska Press. Because “Cooper’s Hawk” takes place in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina, the book falls outside the Nebraska Press fiction guidelines. “I finally had to break my hiatus from literary agents,” Tracy jokes, “and I’m thrilled to be partnering with Diane and her team.”